Resharper 3.0 EAP in Action – The Todo Explorer

The ReSharper 3.0 EAP has been in progress for about two weeks now. This is the first post in a series that will look in detail at some of the new features that will be available in this latest version of ReSharper.

The To-do Explorer

In Visual Studio.NET 2005, you can use the Task List window to show comments with the keyword todo in it. However, this only works with files that are open in the IDE; it’s not going to show you TODOs in other parts of your solution that you don’t currently have open, or any other keyword EXCEPT todo.The Visual Studio.NET 2005 Task List window

In ReSharper 3.0, you get the much more useful To-do Explorer. When you open this window (found in ReSharper -> Windows -> To-do Explorer), by default you see a solution-wide listing of all comments with the prefix NOTE, TODO or BUG.The new To-do Explorer window

The default keywords that the To-do explorer looks for can be changed or added to by clicking the â€œTo-do settingsâ€ icon in the window.

In the settings window, you can create new keywords to search for or edit the existing keywords as youâ€™d like. This could be useful, for example, if you have a references to JIRA tickets in your comments, like://PROJ-1655: The following code block was added because of a change request from a client
You could add a pattern to match the keyword â€œPROJ-####â€ and see all JIRA tickets mentioned in your code.

Editing keywords in the To-do explorer

These To-dos can also be exported to a text file and can also be grouped to make the To-dos easier to read, so you can find which projects, namespaces, directories, etc … contain To-dos.The To-do Explorer view options

“(…)itâ€™s not going to show you(…)any other keyword EXCEPT todo”
This isn’t correct. The keywords “hack”, “undone” and “todo” are predefined, and you can add/customize keywords using Options -> Environment -> Task list. The requirement that files must be open is a huge drawback though, and I’m looking forward to try your implementation.

I dont believe there is any way to track “completed” work items with the to-do explorer. However, off the top of my head, you could always export the outstanding todos to an xml file, commit that to SVN and then DIFF the files every time you want to see what’s changed.

As for Orcas, while there are a ton of nice features coming in that release, it’s still not going to be released for a while. On top of that, I think you’d be surprised just how many people are stuff in the Visual Basic world still

Dmitry, according to the ReSharper 3.0 EAP roadmap, there is basic support for XAML already. I do not know if the plan is for full XAML support in 3.0, but you can probably expect more XAML support to be added in the near future.